


Transmutation

by redsnake05



Category: Glitch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Imagination, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Transformation, Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 02:22:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8871922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsnake05/pseuds/redsnake05
Summary: In the tension between pure imagination and loneliness, Grendaline began to wake. Esquibeth followed her heart and mind to look for her, to bring her home, and together they built something altogether new.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cloudtrader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudtrader/gifts).



In the beginning, Grendaline started a drop, as clear and and as heavy as Imagination itself. She contemplated the drop as a mirror, as a lens, to take light and bend and shift it. She made the world waver and distort, she made it magnified, she made it appear entirely in some other place. A single drop started her journey, as she saw all of the world spread before her, inside and outside her single drop. 

No one knows how long Grendaline spent with the first drop of water. Imagination is not like time; its flow is not linear. The branches and eddies and rapids of imagination swirled around and tumbled Grendaline as surely as the placid lakes and pools cradled her. 

Grendaline dreamed of water, and water flowed from her in streams, in jets, in showers, in strong, deep currents. She wandered in imagination with the other Giants and they dreamed together. The world took shape as they communed their shared vision, and Grendaline made merry, rushing rivers and self-similar snowflakes. As wild little Glitchen woke, she made little pools to cool their senses and their feet after they roamed the imagined world. She made ice for skating and summer drinks, and rain for them to turn their faces up to. 

Over time, Grendaline wandered further from the other Giants. She saw and dreamed of things that couldn't fit in the world they had imagined. She followed her drop of water, and she dreamed of a surface of vast, rolling waves, that stretched wider and more lonely than any mountaintop. She dreamed of busy, intricate reefs and waves that broke on them in rainbow clouds of spray. She dreamed of depths, sinking from blue to black as the sun dimmed, as the water grew colder, as it pressed closer and closer. She walked over a sea floor she couldn't see, but she could imagine, and she found beauty in the sand and the rock. The weight and pressure acted on imagination to condense it, and her dreams became clearer and sharper and ever more vivid. In a still, black world, her imagination was full, ardent with love of all the things that water could promise.

The land seemed more distant to her now, and the dreams of the other Giants were harder to see and feel and connect to. Her dark still waters were bare of minerals and no plants bloomed here. Her long, constant swells cradled no animals. Grendaline found less and less to interest her in the memories of sunlight and sly foxes and glowing caverns. She drifted, deeply immersed in imagination, but also deeply alone. In that tension, she began to wake.

>>>>

Esquibeth opened her eyes to the spray of rain. She was soaked in moments, and she found herself laughing as her hair stuck to her face and her feet squished, and her new imaginings found water all around her. Though she came to love the rocks and trees and dear little chickens, water was her first love. She wandered through the world and soaked her feet in Grendaline's pools and streams, and swam in her lakes. She loved the chilly damp of snow and fog, the sharpness of ice. Water could be all these things and more; Esquibeth loved the unbridled imagination of it.

Slowly, as she walked and built and imagined, she found that she came to expect things that weren't there. She would step into a puddle and be perplexed by the muddy bottom, the little circumference of it hemming her in, when she had imagined some huge, wild vast expanse for her to plunge into. She felt there was more to be imagined, but could not find it anywhere.

As she walked the world, she looked for the water, and what she found was good, but not as much as she knew there should be. She devoted herself to Grendaline, and her contemplations took her as deep as she could go in the world that she had around her. She felt distant, too, like she couldn't quite reach Grendaline, like she was treading through air instead of the thick, cool, embrace of water. 

As time went on, Grendaline became harder to reach, but Esquibeth felt a sense of deep connection with the vision she did access. The long, rolling swells of the surface were satisfying as they rocked her, and Esquibeth felt love and exaltation together, being squeezed and refined by the pressure of Grendaline's depths. 

One day, one of the other Glitchen said that many were worried that Grendaline was waking up. Esquibeth couldn't comprehend that; when Grendaline seemed to live in a dense, pure world of watery imagination, why would she wake? However, she could feel the gap widening all the time, between that watery world and the solid world she stood in. She felt cold dread at the thought of awakening, and immediately felt that there must be something she could do, something that could avert that fate. Even as she resolved to do something, anything she could, she imagined the possibility of merging - dissolving, perhaps - into Grendaline. The thought of slipping into imagination itself was vivid and exciting, but Esquibeth pushed it aside for the moment, thinking only of how she might pull Grendaline back into deeper sleep again.

Esquibeth talked to others and searched for the way to reach Grendaline. She read through old notes found stashed in the ancestral lands, and listened to the theories of the devout and those skilled in focusing imagination. She found an idea waiting for her one day. Looking at it from all directions, she could see no flaws. Perhaps she would be able to reach Grendaline. Perhaps she would save all Glitch. Perhaps - and she hugged the secret wild thrill of the idea to her chest - perhaps she would find imagination open to her, and she would be able to step into it and dissociate freely into its limitless expanse.

>>>>

The music of the chimes travelled swiftly through the water. The vibrations shook back and forth as they shaped the sweet round notes, and Grendaline heard them with one of the deepest parts of her mind. The first one reminded her of sunlight, and she felt no nostalgia for that. The next ones, though, spoke of love and possibility, and she felt an urge to listen more closely, to feel aligned to the Glitchen who sounded them.

The finished sequence rang on and on in long, slow waves in Grendaline's deep, dense world. The notes reminded her of the surface, and she saw islands and reefs and estuaries with their swirling, eddying life. They reminded her of the sunlit shallows; she could see fish and tall forests of kelp. They sounded again and she could feel the love and imagination of the Glitchen who rang them. This Glitchen saw the water too, in all its terrifying, uplifting forms, and she showed Grendaline a world where water was both powerful and necessary.

Grendaline sighed, and the tension of her loneliness started to fade. She felt closer to the other Giants, now, having seen their worlds together again. She drifted deeper, letting the water cradle her, as she dreamed of diversity, of richness, of life and possibility. She let imagination wrap her up.

Above all, she felt the Glitchen who had sounded the chimes. It was her heart and mind that had shaped the simple notes into a symphony. She was the one who had seen, more clearly than Grendaline herself, the new way the world might be shaped. Grendaline reached out to her.

>>>>

Standing on a ledge, Esquibeth looked down at the water below her. The music of the chimes still rang in her ears. She was sure she'd done them right. The play of sunlight over waves mingled with the inky depths in the simple melody, and she waited on the cliff hoping that her music had called to Grendaline.

She felt a slow shift in the world around her, like it relaxed and settled. Imagination seemed to flow more strongly and with more purpose. She yearned for the water below her, and stepped off the ledge without hesitation. The water closed around her and she sank deeper with slow deliberation. It was cool and all-encompassing; Esquibeth had nothing to do but fall. 

Around her, the water suddenly filled with new animals. Sweet silvery fish darted back and forth and a jellyfish drifted past. She saw sleek, dark bodies made for speed and sharp-toothed jaws. Fresh greens sprouted on rocks in fuzzy blankets and fanciful stranded curlicues. The rocks themselves varied too in shape and colour; they formed arches and crevices and undulations that echoed the movement of the water above. All around her, the water was alive with all parts of imagination.

Esquibeth sank lower still, and the water grew darker and colder, but she was not afraid. The imagination here was just as strong and perhaps even more concentrated than she'd ever experienced before. The occasional half-seen flash of a fish swimming past, or the indescribable undulations of a squid, were like a kind of magic as the water pressed on her and around her more heavily.

At last she reached the bottom, and the thunk of her feet on the basalt rang loud in her ears like one last chime. Grendaline turned, and Esquibeth saw her clearly at last, though it was hard to focus, and Esquibeth clutched her hands to her chest as she fought not to be overwhelmed.

Grendaline was not as Esquibeth had seen her before, the version that slept in the halls of the Giants. This version of her had not the rows of teeth of her icon, though Esquibeth had seen them repeated in the spectacular mouths of sharks. She had no need for rows of eyes down here, though the twin tails were the same. Esquibeth realised that this was Grendaline stripped of the artifice and ornamentation needed for most Glitchen to see the Giants. This was Grendaline as pure imagination: terrifying, imposing, simple, blissful.

Grendaline did not move or speak, and yet Esquibeth could feel the invitation to join with Grendaline ring clearly inside her mind and heart. She opened her arms and took a breath, letting the water fill her, open her up, dissociate her into imagination. Esquibeth gave herself up to the water with calm, with love, with joy.

>>>>

Grendaline slept deeply. She reached out to her siblings and their dreams twined together once again. The world stretched a little more, and Grendaline walked through Samudra, from the edge of the vortex, through Jal, to the beautiful sea shores of Firozi. Every step was imagination and possibility, seen through the dense, clear lens of the water.

She used imagination to capture the story of Esquibeth, but stopped it at the point where she stepped off the ledge. She knew that few would understand the deliberate abandon of Esquibeth's actions, even though she could feel her tucked away deep inside herself. Esquibeth was not gone. She was formless and diffuse in the random motion of water, powerful and unchanging in the vast scope of imagination. Grendaline could still hear the echo of her music, and she gave it back to the world of imagination, over and over again.


End file.
